You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)
Well, according to an interview at The Vergewith Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these “hallucinations” are an “inherent feature” of AI large language models (LLM), which is what drives AI Overviews, and this feature “is still an unsolved problem.”
If I was in charge, Gemini would be immediately tabled.
Here’s a solution: don’t make AI provide the results. Let humans answer each other’s questions like in the good old days.
Locked: duplicate
What is locked?
Theyre making a reference to stackoverflow.com, a website for IT/programming related questions. On that site moderators will typically lock (prevent updates on) new posts as they appear to be duplicates of existing questions/posts.
Whatever happened to Jeeves? He seemed like a good guy. He probably burned out.
You can find him walking Lycos around Geocities picking up it’s poop in little green plastic bags.
Is that the city over by Angelfire?
Saddened to see Angelfire being overrun by Neopets.
They stuck him in a glass case in a museum.
and our parents told us Wikipedia couldn’t be trusted…
How a non-profit site that is constantly maintained and requires cited sources was vilified for being able to be defaced for 5 minu-
Oh wait, that was probably an astroturfing campaing by for profit companies.
Huh. That made me stop and realize how long I’ve been around. Wikipedia still feels like a new addition to society to me, even though I’ve been using it for around 20 years now.
And what you said, is something I’ve cautioned my daughter about, and first said that to her about ten years ago.
Conservapedia to the rescue.
Since when has feeding us misinformation been a problem for capitalist parasites like Pichai?
Misinformation is literally the first line of defense for them.
“put glue in your tomato sauce.”
“Omg you ate a capitalist parasite spreading misinformation intentionally!”
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“put glue in your tomato sauce.”
Doesn’t sound all that different from the stuff emanating from the right’s Great Orange Hope a while back that worked pretty well to keep his base appropriately frothing at the mouth - you are free to write it off as pure coincidence… but I won’t just yet.
Can you come up with any rational explanation as to why they would do that?
Which part?
The part where it’s not “pure coincidence” but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
but instead a deliberate part of some conspiracy.
You mean… apart from the bog-standard propaganda regime the capitalist class has been enforcing on us long before either of us were born?
Yes, besides that. Specifically why this. Thanks.
Removed by mod
LLMs trained on shitposting are too obvious for it to be quality misinformation.
For quality disinformation they should train them solely on MBA course-work and documents produced by people with MBAs.
Sure, the rate of false information would be even worse, but it would be formatted in slick ways meant to obfuscate meaning, which would avoid the kind of hilarity that has ensued when Google deployed an LLM trained on Reddit data and thus be much better for Google’s stock price.
AI isn’t giving the right misinformation
Well, we can’t have that, can we?
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense. It directly devalues their offering of being able to provide you with an accurate answer to something you look for. And if their overall offering becomes less valuable, so does their ability to steer you using their results.
So while the incorrect nature is not a problem in itself for them, (as you see from his answer)… the degradation of their ability to influence results is.
Google isn’t bothered by incorrect results because search results are no longer their product. Constantly rising stock values are their product now. Hype is their path to those higher values.
That is actually a really good observation.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
Fair enough… but drowning out any honest discourse with a flood of histrionic right-wing horseshit has always been the core strategy of the US propaganda model - I’d say that their AI is just doing the logical thing and taking the horseshit to a very granular level. I mean… “put glue on your pizza” is just not that far off “drink bleach to kill viruses on the inside.”
I know I’m describing a pattern that probably wasn’t intentional (I hope) - but the pattern does look like it could fit.
Oh don’t get me wrong I know exactly what you mean and I agree… it’s just that the LLMs are spewing actual nonsense and that breaks the whole principle of what a search engine should do… provide me accurate results.
But this is not misinformation, it is uncontrolled nonsense.
The strategy is to get you to keep feeding Google new prompts in order to feed you more adds.
The AI response is just a gimmick. It gives Google something to tell their investors, when they get asked “What are you doing with AI right now? We hear that’s big.”
But the real money is getting unique user interactions for the purpose of serving up more ad content. In that model, bad answers are actually better than no answers, because they force the end use to keep refining the query and searching through the site backlog.
If you don’t know the answer is bad, which confident idiots spouting off on reddit and being upvoted into infinity has proven is common, then you won’t refine your search. You’ll just accept the bad answer and move on.
Your logic doesn’t follow. If someone doesn’t know the answer and are searching for it, they likely won’t be able to tell if the answer is correct. We literally already have that problem with misinformation. And what sounds more confident than an AI?
I don’t believe they will retain user interactions if the reason for the user interactions dissapears. The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
I can understand some users just want to be spoonfed an answer. But that’s not what most people expect from a search engine.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites that turn a Reddit post into an article of 500 words using an LLM without any actual value. That should be googles proposition.
The value of Google is they provide accurate search results.
They offer the most accurate results of search engines you’re familiar with. But in a shrinking field with degrading quality, that’s a low bar and sinking quick.
I want google to use actual AI to filter out all the nonsense sites
So did the last head of Google search, until the new CEO fired him.
If its job is to write a fan fic on what may or may not be true on what you asked for, then it does a great job. But typically people search for information, and getting what is essentially a glorified auto complete isn’t useful. It’s like big tech has learned nothing about the massive issue of disinformation and just added fuel to the fire to an unsolved problem we’re still very much trying to figure out.
He’s such a damn clown.
But it’s so easy.
With neural networks, it is impossible, and we have known that for 30 years at least. It has been taught in the universities all the time.
Shut that crap down. Leave the neural net technology.
Then develop the next AI technology and make it better.
(Accept that you can’t make money from it for at least 5 or 10 years or so, and No, I am not going to figure out how many quarters that is)
rule of thumb: multiply by 4 to convert from years to quarters. You’re welcome.
just like there’s no solution for not punishing youtubers who follow the rules while allowing doxxers and pedos to use youtube to dox people and lure little girls into their houses.
I’d have to send you back in time.
Yeah no shit, that’s what LLMs do
The answer is dont inflate your stock price by cramming the latest tech du jour in to your flagship product… but we all know thats not an option.
You mean hallucinations like this one?
How about turn it the fuck off since it sucks and eventually will kill someone.
These models are mad libs machines. They just decide on the next word based on input and training. As such, there isn’t a solution to stopping hallucinations.
Have they tried not using it? 🤦
They have to. They, along with every other tech megacorp right now, have invested unfathomable amounts of money into AI and have their investors and shareholders creaming their pants as they ride high on the fumes of their own farts. They’d be drawn and quartered if they suddenly did a 180 or in any way admitted their product is massively overvalued and nearly useless.
The idea of boards and corporations need to fucking die. Coops or burn it to the ground. I’m tired of society actively working against itself.
Issue is, the whole AI explosion is hiding a financial crisis, so tech companies rushing out LLMs, slapping AI onto everything they can (even thermoswitches), to keep investors happy. Smaller companies in the AI bubble are already bursting (e.g. Rabbit), OpenAI’s downfall isn’t a far-fetched dream, although they’ll likely just fire Sam Altman and concentrate on more obtainable and useful AI tech.
